Kennedy, and What Might Have Been

‘JFK’s Last Hundred Days,’ by Thurston Clarke

As the 50th anniversary this November of the assassination of John F. Kennedy looms on the horizon, the debates over his legacy and presidency continue: a procession of “what ifs” and “might have beens,” accompanied by contradictory arguments, and informed and not-so-informed speculation. Would Kennedy have avoided Lyndon B. Johnson’s tragic escalation of the war in Vietnam? Would he have found a way to propel his stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation through Congress and start a war on poverty, or was Johnson able to achieve these historic goals only through a combination of his bare-knuckled, tactical knowledge of Congress; his personal relationships on Capitol Hill; and his ability to use the momentum of sentiment generated by Kennedy’s death?

Several schools of argument have arisen. The former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen and the aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. focused on Kennedy’s record and the promise of his vision, creating a sort of bildungsroman portrait of the president, as learning and growing on the job.

Debunkers like Garry Wills and Seymour M. Hersh, by contrast, focused on the dark side of Camelot, suggesting that what they saw as Kennedy’s moral shortcomings and recklessness endangered the nation. More judicious and substantive accounts have been provided by Richard Reeves (“President Kennedy: Profile of Power”) and Robert Dallek (“An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963”).

Thurston Clarke’s patchy and often reductive new book, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” draws heavily on the Dallek and Reeves books, while attempting to advance variations on arguments made by Sorensen and Schlesinger. Mr. Clarke contends that during that crucial period Kennedy was “finally beginning to realize his potential as a man and a president”; just as “ambition and realpolitik had characterized his congressional career and early White House years, morality and emotion tempered his ambitions during his last hundred days.”

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Credit
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Mr. Clarke also argues that during those days, Kennedy began to show his wife, Jacqueline, “the marriage they might have had,” arguing that the death of their premature infant, Patrick, in August 1963 had brought them closer together, and that he seemed to have curtailed his womanizing.

In Mr. Clarke’s view, two speeches the president gave in June 1963 — one proposing negotiations with Moscow to draft a nuclear test ban treaty, the other declaring that “race has no place in American life or law” — represented a turning point in his life, when he went from sailing with the winds of political expediency to embracing principle, as he described some of his heroes doing in “Profiles in Courage.”

Mr. Clarke made a similar argument about Robert F. Kennedy in his powerful 2008 book, “The Last Campaign,” writing that Robert appeared to begin that campaign as a homage to his brother but came into his own, speaking with an inspirational intensity and rawness rarely seen in politics about poverty, racial injustice and the country’s unhealed wounds. Others, too, have observed that the quick-tempered, hard-boiled Bobby — who’d worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s and who’d been a tough enforcer on Jack’s 1960 campaign — became a more introspective, empathetic man after his brother’s assassination; grief and a passion for fighting for the poor had changed him.

This new book, though, lacks the visceral immediacy of “The Last Campaign,” and Mr. Clarke is less persuasive making a case for Jack Kennedy’s transformation in the last months of his life.

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Thurston ClarkeCredit
Ellen Warner

The idea of transformation is deeply appealing: we live in a culture that prizes reinvention and second acts. With John F. Kennedy, however, it’s difficult to make a case for dramatic change or to suggest that in June 1963 “he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head.”

It’s difficult partly because, as Mr. Clarke points out, Kennedy was “one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House”: a man who compartmentalized different aspects of his life and who frequently said and did contradictory things. His most essential quality, the literary critic Alfred Kazin is quoted as saying, was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself.”

Kennedy’s opinions, too, could appear to mutate swiftly, and could be read in numerous ways. Much of the debate over what Kennedy would have eventually done about Vietnam — find a way to extricate the United States or listen to the same hard-liners who would help persuade Johnson to escalate American involvement — stems from wildly divergent remarks he made on the subject, remarks subject to a variety of interpretations.

Mr. Clarke says that Kennedy delivered a response to the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite in early September 1963 that was calculated to “prepare Americans for the possibility that the war might be unwinnable.” In the final analysis, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese government: “It is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it.”

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John F. Kennedy in Washington State during his Western conservation tour in 1963.Credit
Cecil Stoughton/White House, via John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

A week later, during an interview with David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC News, Kennedy declared that he believed in the domino theory (which held that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would go Communist, too), then concluded: “I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.” Mr. Clarke contends that this statement “bore no more resemblance to his real intentions than Roosevelt’s pledge not to involve America in the Second World War did to his,” adding, “Kennedy wanted to placate hawks in the Pentagon and Congress, just as Roosevelt had wanted to placate the isolationists.”

In his 2003 biography, Mr. Dallek wrote that Kennedy’s actions and statements “are suggestive of a carefully managed stand-down from the sort of involvement that occurred under L.B.J.,” but also noted that “no one can prove, of course, what Kennedy would have” actually done.

Mr. Clarke gives us an often vivid portrait of Kennedy as an immensely complex human being: by turns detached and charismatic, a hard-nosed pol and a closet romantic, cautious in his decision making but reckless in his womanizing. His book, however, lacks the granular detail and sober, appraising eye of Mr. Dallek’s volume. Too often, Mr. Clarke seems to be cherry-picking details and anecdotes that support his overarching thesis — that Kennedy began to hit his stride in his last 100 days, starting to emerge as “a great president” — rather than carefully assessing the historical record.

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Mr. Clarke focuses, speculatively, on what Kennedy planned to do, rather than on what he achieved, writing that, among other things, the president “intended to travel to Moscow for a summit meeting with Khrushchev; launch a secret dialogue with Castro; explore the possibility of establishing a relationship with China; withdraw a thousand advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and remove more during 1964; settle the cold war; end the threat of a nuclear war; launch an attack on poverty; pass his tax cut, civil rights and immigration bills; preside over the most robust, full-employment economy in American history; and continue marrying poetry to power and inspiring the young.”

Mr. Clarke plays down, even dismisses, Johnson’s extraordinary legislative mojo in getting Kennedy’s stalled initiatives passed, making the debatable assertion that Kennedy “would have succeeded in getting a civil rights bill through Congress, but perhaps not until after the election” of 1964. He also writes that the Great Society, Johnson’s domestic legislative program, “was largely a compendium of Kennedy’s bills and initiatives.”

Such efforts by Mr. Clarke to inflate Kennedy’s achievements distract from his actual accomplishments and influence, and they also make this intermittently interesting volume feel like a sentimental work of hagiography.

JFK’S LAST HUNDRED DAYS

The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

By Thurston Clarke

Illustrated. 432 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95.

A version of this review appears in print on August 13, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Kennedy, And What Might Have Been. Today's Paper|Subscribe